Gatsby 2.0 and Forestry

I’ve let this blog sit idle for a very long time because all the cool kids stopped blogging and I’ve spent so much time on the tech that I neglected writing anything.

I’m hoping to change that now. My initial experience with Gatsby wasn’t good. I don’t have a lot of time and so getting everything setup took forever. In spite of the effort I knew that I wanted a static site. I used to use WordPress. It’s painfully slow to load. Keeping up with security updates was a nightmare and the allure of hosting content on S3 for a few pennies a month was just too great. Given that pain I’ve gone through a couple of site generators. Jekyll was technology of choice for a long time. I write a lot of Ruby code so it was a natural fit. However it was slow. I’ve been enjoying learning and playing around with Go so I considered Hugo. It’s really fast, but I really wanted to be able to customize my code a bit via Javascript so Gatsby won. I guess that’s a lot about technology right after I said I was going to spend more time writing and less time on tech.

Given how much pain I went through to get everything setup I was dreading the Gatsby 2.0 upgrade. Turns out it wasn’t bad. I spent about 3 hours changing some code, upgrading packages and thinking about how to proceed going forward.

Ironically, part of that process included considering a move to Hugo and dumping Gatsby. While looking through Hugo templates I discovered forestry.io. I sit at a computer all day and so opening my site, writing and post and doing a deploy isn’t a big deal. However, I really wanted to be able to make a post on the web, have it commit to my github repo, and have it auto deploy to my site. I started down the path of writing the code to make that happen multiple times, but life and work and a million things meant I never had time to finish it. Forestry solves that exact problem.

Now I can stop writing code I’ll never finish and focus on writing posts that no one will read :).